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The Spirit of Democracy
Jeffrey Stout
Columbia Legal Theory Workshop
November, 2004
The following paper is the transcript of a talk that I have delivered this fall to general
audiences at the University of Tennessee and the University of Notre Dame. It summarizes a
position on one aspect of the ethics of citizenship—a position explicated and defended in
more strictly philosophical terms in my book, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2004). I would encourage anyone interested in the details of my
critique of Rawls and Rorty to read chapter 3. My critiques of John Milbank, Alasdair
MacIntyre, and Stanley Hauerwas are presented in chapters 4-7.
Things would be different if you and I and others like us behaved differently.
This is the thought that the Levelers had in mind when they claimed that all English
citizens have a share in responsibility for decisions about who rules England and how.
Sojourner Truth gave the same thought another twist hundreds of years later when she
said: “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside
down all alone, [today’s] women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it rightside up again.”1
The thought is not that things would be different if we were gods or supermen. It
need not involve an aspiration to take God’s place. The thought is that things would be
different if we did what we could do, given our ordinary human capacities to think,
converse, and interact with one another. And what we could do, in this sense, is what we
can reasonably be held responsible for failing to do—by God, according to believers, on
the day of judgment, by the victims of injustice in our midst today, if we give them a
voice, and by our descendants, who will someday have to live with the long-term
consequences of our actions.
By refusing to defer to unjust rulers or any other human being who claims to be
our superior, it is in our power to deny them effective authority. This implies that the
decision about who rules and what the basic roles and regulations are going to be in fact
rests with us. The responsibility for our institutional arrangements belongs to us. What,
then, do I mean by the spirit of democracy? The notion that we, the people, are
responsible for the condition of our society and that it is therefore up to us to take
responsibility for our common life.
The self-conscious affirmation of this responsibility first achieves expression in
early-modern Christian talk about popular sovereignty. This talk was not meant to deny
God’s ultimate sovereignty over the political order as part of creation. To the contrary, it
took for granted that all human beings are responsible ultimately to God for the human
arrangements in which they are complicit. But the notion of popular sovereignty did
involve a historic expansion in the range of things for which human beings are to be held
responsible. The basic social framework had long been viewed as given by God, as
something already settled as part of God’s creation, with the basic roles having already
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been defined and distributed. Both sides of the original debate over popular sovereignty
made their cases in theological terms. Both sides acknowledged God’s ultimate
sovereignty over all creation.
Modern democracy is the tradition in which the implications of human
responsibility for human arrangements are gradually made explicit—not only in cities
and states, but also in civil society, in corporations, and in families. It consists in the
attempt on the part of human beings to exercise collective responsibility over the
arrangements governing them. Exercising this responsibility in the public sphere is a
matter of holding rulers responsible for the arrangements they make on one’s behalf and
holding one’s fellow citizens responsible for the role they play in determining who rules
and what the arrangements are going to be. In the ancient world democracy meant direct
rule by the commons. In the modern world it refers in the first instance to formal
procedures that allow citizens to turn them out of office in favor of someone else. As
Oliver O’Donovan points out, the modern legislature or parliament is supposed to
conduct its deliberations against the background of, and in response to, a public
discussion in which all members of the society are entitled to participate. In this respect,
it differs from medieval councils, which served at the pleasure of monarchs and gave
their advice to them privately.2
But the meaning of democracy in the modern world is hardly exhausted by the
procedural structures of government. Indeed, the structures of government, being largely
administrative, tend to be largely bureaucratic in nature. They tend also to be large,
hierarchical, and to some extent corrupt. As such, they are also resistant, for a variety of
reasons, to being held responsible by the societies they are supposed to serve. It therefore
makes sense to say that modern governmental structures are democratic only to the extent
that they are actually responsive to a public discussion and an electoral process in which
members of the society in question actually participate. Hence Dewey’s claim, in his
early essay “The Ethics of Democracy,” that “Democracy is a form of government only
because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.”3
In other words, a form of government ceases to be democratic insofar as the
public life surrounding it ceases to be animated—ethically inspirited—by a concerted
attempt on the part of citizens to hold one another responsible for the condition of the
government and to hold governmental officials responsible to the governed. The activity
of holding rulers and one’s fellow citizens responsible by offering reasons to them and
demanding reasons from them places citizens in a moral association with one another—
an association the spirit of which is mutual recognition and accountability. By allowing
all citizens to express their own most deeply felt commitments and aspirations, as well as
their interests, in the public discussion, a genuinely democratic community also implicitly
affirms its members as spiritual beings. The spirit of democracy resides in a citizenry
that practices accountability and mutual recognition. Where the spirit of democracy is
lacking, the rhetoric of democracy becomes mere ideology, a decoration draped over
institutions to enhance their authority by disguising their nondemocratic reality.
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Democratic discussion cannot proceed from perfect agreement in spiritual
outlook, because the most deeply felt commitments expressed in it are various,
conflicting, and constantly in flux. Still, many are the citizens who aspire, in expressing
their concerns, to bring about a more perfect union by their own lights. The United States
of America is full of perfectionists bent on perfecting both themselves and the life that
citizens share together. But democracy in this time and place has had to come to terms
with a plurality of perfectionisms. American citizens are conscious to the extent to which
their ideals of perfection conflict. While modern democracy has deep religious roots, and
retains a perfectionist impulse, it should not be viewed as a species of religion. It has
become an attempt on the part of human beings to take responsibility for shared
arrangements, despite (and in light of) the differences in religious outlook that divide one
person from another. Its wise defenders value it without proposing it as an object of
worship in its own right. To bow down before democracy, or any other product of human
effort, is idolatry.
Almost every finite good becomes somebody’s ultimate concern sooner or later,
and democracy is no exception. That is why my book chastises Whitman, one of my
heroes, for occasionally allowing his love of democracy to degenerate into “chauvinistic
idolatry.” All human societies are prone to self-idolatry. A society that takes pride in
democratic self-reliance is no less prone to self-idolatry than a society that considers
itself God’s chosen people. The warning is always in order.
Our society is so far from being worthy of worship in my view that it barely
sustains the hope required to continue the struggle for just arrangements. Sheldon Wolin
rightly laments “the evisceration of democracy” in our day.4 The problem has a cultural
and an institutional dimension. Culturally, individuals had until recently largely lost their
habits of political participation. In most recent elections they voted in low numbers.
What they said in public often lacked the spirit of mutual accountability and respect
essential to the “moral and spiritual association” Dewey was trying to describe in 1885.
As Wolin makes clear, many members of our society do not think of themselves as
citizens, as having a share in the responsibility for its condition (590-594). Given that
they work mainly in corporate and governmental bureaucracies, they are in the habit of
deferring to superiors and then expressing their resentment privately. They have learned
the habits of the culture they inhabit.
The state of political culture reflects the nature of our institutions. We now live in
a world dominated militarily by the American Superpower and economically by
corporate conglomerates. Our inherited procedures of accountability—the election of
political representatives, legislative bodies that are responsive to public discourse, and an
independent judiciary —might now be incapable of constraining the mutually reinforcing
powers of empire and capital. Organizationally speaking, Wolin concludes, we have
entered a postdemocratic era.
Democracy survives, in effect, only by splitting in half. On the institutional level,
as the semblance of an accountable form of government, it is a structure of electoral and
other procedures in fact controlled by empire and capital; it is the means of disguise by
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which empire and capital legitimate their control of government. On the cultural level, as
a social practice dedicated to demanding real accountability, democracy becomes
“fugitive.” It becomes a perpetual but necessarily ephemeral struggle to hold
organizations of all kinds accountable for their behavior. Fugitive democracy depends, as
Wolin puts it, on “the ingenuity of ordinary people in inventing temporary forms to meet
their needs” (603). It does not aspire to govern, he says, because that would involve
accommodating itself to hierarchical institutions. It aspires instead to “nurture the civic
conscience of society” (606).
I share Wolin’s concerns about the evisceration of democracy. And as
Democracy and Tradition makes clear, I am more than happy to join him in an attempt to
nurture the civic conscience of society. Better fugitive democracy than no democracy at
all. Yet I also worry that Wolin’s vision is self-defeating. His picture of our situation is
too bleak to sustain hope, but also too bleak to be entirely accurate. Fugitive
democracy—like its close cousin, fugitive Christianity—threatens to become a mere
“ought” that has lost both its roots in the soil of social life and any hope of effecting
change in the institutions it criticizes. It is the spirit of spiritless conditions, the sigh of
creatures who take themselves to be powerless against the major agents of their
oppressed condition.
Wolin sees grounds for hope only at the local level. It is true that local
arrangements are inherently easier for citizens to hold accountable than national and
global arrangements are. Capital now holds by far the greatest concentration of power,
operates freely at the national and global levels, and transforms most political officials at
both of these levels into its tools. But the arrangements required to keep power
concentrated in this way—deregulation of corporations, imperial control of oil-rich
countries, and a shift of societal burdens from rich to poor—depend for their survival on
the deference and torpor of ordinary people. If we, and many others like us, behaved
differently, things would be different.
To abandon the hope that we might, by changing our own behavior, be able to use
governmental structures to exercise a greater degree of control on the economy than we
now do is also to resign ourselves to ever-increasing domination by corporate elites.
While it is foolish to think that the election of democrats to political office would
transform government into something other than a sprawling hierarchical bureaucracy, it
is too early or too despairing simply to concede essentially unconstrained global power to
capital. It is also premature to cede control of the legislative and electoral processes to
big money or control of the judiciary to people who believe that the Bill of Rights
became obsolete on the day our government declared a permanent state of war against
terrorism.
Even from the vantage point of a strictly fugitive democracy, the question of who
holds office in the three branches of government in the United States remains an issue of
great consequence for people everywhere. The major institutional buttress of fugitive
democracy as a cultural force in the United States is judicial respect for the First
Amendment. If we lose freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right of
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assembly, democracy will not be fugitive; it will be subterranean. If the legal system is to
survive as a significant institutional repository of practical wisdom, it needs judges who
are prepared to nourish the spirit of democracy and protect the Bill of Rights. Who will
appoint those judges, if democrats abandon the mechanisms of government to the
interests of empire and capital? I conclude that a strictly fugitive democracy—as a
politics that has lost all hope in the representative function of government as a means for
holding rulers accountable—is self-defeating in practice.
If fugitive democracy is self-defeating, is that because Wolin’s picture is too
bleak or because it is not bleak enough? The completely bleak conclusion would be that
democracy can survive in the decades ahead, if at all, only by going underground, by
abandoning its hopes of holding any institution accountable and becoming instead a
subterranean affair of clandestine meetings and occasional imprisonment and martyrdom.
If it comes to that, then underground I will go. But it is not obvious to me that ordinary
people are incapable of taking collective responsibility for their institutional
arrangements. Wolin underestimates the potential vitality of democratic culture because
he doesn’t look in the right places to find it. His localism proceeds largely without the
benefit of local knowledge.
The eclipse of the American tradition of democratic thought in Wolin’s work is
almost total. In his magisterial book on Tocqueville he sees America through the
somewhat blinkered eyes of a European aristocrat. Of the great American thinkers who
were preoccupied with democracy, only Emerson appears in Wolin’s book on
Tocqueville—and he is mentioned only once, in passing.5 The expanded edition of
Politics and Vision mentions neither Emerson, nor Whitman, nor Thoreau. John Dewey,
to whom Wolin devotes considerable attention, is thus deprived of his Emersonian
forebears. He springs out of nowhere into an otherwise wholly European canon.
Dewey’s successors are no more visible in Wolin’s story than his predecessors. Why are
these omissions significant? Because David Bromwich was right when he warned: “if
one tried to imagine an America free of Emerson’s influence, the strictures of
[Tocqueville’s] Democracy in America would turn into an accurate prophecy.”6
Tocqueville’s picture would have been correct if Emerson had never existed. But
Emerson did exist.
For these reasons, the emphasis Cornel West places—most recently in Democracy
Matters—on “the democratic tradition in America” can be seen as an attempt to
complement and correct the excessively bleak picture offered by his former teacher
Wolin.7 For West, Dewey is one voice in an American tradition of democratic theory
that begins in Emerson’s generation and extends through W.E.B. Du Bois, Muriel
Rukeyser, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, down to the present. Equally important,
according to West, one can discern sources of democratic vitality in the religious
outlooks of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have learned from the prophets how to
hold societies and rulers accountable to God’s standards of righteousness.8 West argues
that those who look hard enough can discern similarly prophetic impulses hidden even in
a secular youth culture that has otherwise been corrupted by market forces and nihilistic
despair.9
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Hope is not a matter of being sure that things are going to work out well. What
keeps hope alive is the realization that there is no reason to feel certain that our fate is
already sealed. Things have changed before, and they will change again. We should not
pretend to know how the people are going to respond as the gap between the wealthy and
the rest of us continues to widen, the budgetary consequences of tax-cutting begin to be
felt, the military and economic difficulties of maintaining an empire become more salient,
and the struggle with terrorism worsens. A heightened sense of crisis could either hasten
the evisceration of democracy or shake the people from its slumber and remind it of its
heritage. The crisis over slavery helped create the generation that included Lincoln,
Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Fuller, and Douglas. A crisis of similar magnitude could
be approaching. This time around, with the citizenry beginning to stir, intellectuals had
better be ready to retrieve the democratic tradition on behalf of the people. Otherwise,
the people, for lack of a salient alternative that is genuinely democratic, will probably
consent to some kind of despotism that masquerades as democracy.
Now consider this question: What is happening to the young people who would
have joined the Civil Rights Movement if they had come of age politically when I did in
the 1960s? When a lot of them get to college or law school, they are exposed to forms of
moral and political philosophy that insist on the importance of keeping religion
completely out of politics. As a result, some of them become liberal secularists. Others
recoil and retreat into anti-liberal forms of traditionalism.
The traditionalist backlash is fairly extreme among the theologians. The
traditionalists feel that if liberal secularism is what American democracy is all about, then
genuinely religious people will have to be against it. The most prolific and influential
theologian in America is Stanley Hauerwas, who teaches at Duke Divinity School. In the
same month as the 9/11 catastrophe, Time magazine named Hauerwas America’s Best
Theologian. (That was the same issue in which Allen Iverson was named America’s Best
Athlete.) Hauerwas is a leading traditionalist, and is heavily influenced by the Notre
Dame philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Hauerwas often expresses distaste for liberal
modernity as such, and even suggested in one of his books that justice is a “bad idea” for
Christians. He is actually less crazy than that makes him sound. But perhaps you can see
why I have been trying my best to persuade the theologians to make the churches safe for
King’s legacy.
What, then, about the ethics centers, philosophy departments, law schools, and
politics departments, where some version of liberal secularism has typically taken hold as
the dominant outlook? Working on Democracy and Tradition persuaded me that King
was more faithful to the spirit of the First Amendment than the liberal secularists have
been. King’s view was that all citizens should feel free to express the ideas that lead
them to their political conclusions. The right to do so is protected by the First
Amendment’s ideal of free speech. When those ideas are religious in content, the First
Amendment’s provision for the free exercise of religion also kicks in. Many citizens are
religiously committed to expressing their religious views in public and to pressing for
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policies that are consistent with those views. When such citizens speak freely, they are
also exercising their religious freedom. The Bill of Rights protects them twice over.
It is imprudent, as well as against the spirit of the First Amendment, to tell such
people to shut up or to demand that they filter out the religious content of their thinking
before they address the public. Religious people are going to rely on religious premises
when reasoning about political questions regardless of what the secularists say.
For most religious people, integrity requires that they refuse to separate the
private and public dimensions of life. The “wall of separation” between church and state
does not run through the heart of believers. So unless these people stop being religious,
as seems unlikely, the philosophers who want political deliberation to be conducted in a
completely secularized way are fighting a losing battle. But if that is true, and a large
segment of the citizenry is in fact relying on religious premises when making political
decisions, it behooves all of us to know what those premises are. Premises left
unexpressed are often premises left unchallenged.
Among the great achievements of American history was the abolition of slavery.
How did it come about? Not by argument cast in a thoroughly secularized vocabulary.
The Abolitionists had to persuade American Christians that biblically grounded defenses
of slavery were not compelling, despite St. Paul’s advice that slaves should obey their
masters and the notion that God had punished blacks as descendants of Ham. The
Abolitionists did not say to their opponents, “Keep your religious views to yourselves.”
They said, “Speak your minds, so that we can test the soundness of your argument and its
coherence with the rest of what you have said and done.” And then they talked about the
Exodus from Egyptian slavery and the rights that everyone possesses as a child of God.
A debate is now raging over the issue of same-sex coupling. Like the debate over
slavery, it is full of fear, hatred, and paranoid fantasy. It is too early to know how it will
turn out, but there is no way to avoid having it. If you look at the debate closely, you will
see that it is not a dispute between Christians and non-Christians. Much of the debate is
among Christians who are perfectly orthodox in their conception of God and revelation.
Some of the same biblical passages that mattered greatly in the debate over slavery are
receiving extensive attention again. One of these is Galatians 3:28, where St. Paul
implies that all sorts of divisions, including those separating slave from free and male
from female, are overcome in Christ.
History should teach us something about how real political discussions work in a
religiously diverse democratic republic. Each of us is free to say why we accept the
political conclusions we do. We can filter out the religious content of our reasoning or
not, as we wish. But when we have expressed an argument, we should expect our
interlocutors to pick it apart and to test its fit with other arguments we have made and
other proposals we have favored. We do not just express our own views; we criticize one
another’s views. Sometimes minds change in the process, and we reach a consensus.
Sometimes the discussion grinds to a halt, the votes are counted, and we go home,
determined to press our case a bit differently the next time. Even when consensus is out
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of reach for the time being, however, we can show each other respect as the particular
people we are by hearing each other out and grappling with the arguments that have
actually been made.
A free wheeling exchange of views in the public square can be a dangerous thing.
The debate over slavery led to civil war. The debates over same-sex coupling and
abortion have inspired some to speak of cultural warfare. Whenever a political proposal
appears to threaten an entire way of life to which some people are deeply committed,
passions will inevitably flare. At these moments, much depends on the determination of
citizens to speak the truth as they see it, to address each other with civility and respect, to
avoid manipulation and demagoguery, and to interpret each other’s actions and words
charitably. Political leaders who wish to keep the spirit of democracy alive are especially
obliged to exemplify the virtues of civility and respect when they decide what to say and
how to say it.
Time will tell whether new leaders will arise who can revive the ideal of
democracy in the wake of 9/11. In the meantime, it won’t help for our judges to display
the Ten Commandments in our courthouses or for our Congressmen to stand on the steps
of the Capitol and sing “God Bless America.” The kings and queens of ages past made a
mockery of religion by presuming to be its caretakers; what most of them really wanted
was a kind of religion that would justify their rule while pacifying the populace. Our
elected representatives are prone to the same temptations.
It might seem that I am now taking back what I said before about the First
Amendment, but I am not. The First Amendment’s position on religion includes two
clauses, one of which protects free exercise of religion, the other of which prohibits the
state from establishing a religion for the society as a whole. Public deliberation is fully in
keeping with the spirit of the First Amendment only when it reflects both of these
clauses. Echoing the notion of free exercise, I say that all ordinary citizens should be
encouraged to express all of their reasons for their political conclusions—including, if
they wish, the religious ones. Echoing the prohibition of an established church, I say that
political officials should stay out of the business of speaking for the whole nation on
religious questions.
My problem with most of the distinctively religious reasons expressed these days
in the public square is that they are false, not that they are unconstitutional. But how am I
going to show what is wrong with such reasons unless religious people express the actual
premises from which they infer their political conclusions? And what leads anybody to
think that people like this are going to agree to follow secularist advice about how to
reason politically? As I see it, the secularist restriction on the expression of religious
reasons is both counterproductive and unrealistic.
Hence, I propose no such restriction. Instead, I propose a relentless program of
respectful but hard-hitting immanent criticism, directed against all positions, religious or
not, that lend support to injustice or threaten to muzzle democratic debate. The
secularists and the new traditionalists are the objects of my immanent criticism in
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Democracy and Tradition. But they hardly exhaust the list of outlooks that need to be
criticized. Among the most urgent tasks on the agenda of public intellectuals today is the
criticism of the so-called “compassionate conservatism” of the Bush administration.
Another, of course, is the criticism of Islamic radicalism. Both of these “isms” are much
more important than the ones I have examined in Democracy and Tradition.
The current debate over the role of religion in politics isn’t just about what
citizens and leaders should say when engaging in political deliberation. It is also about
the nature of the religion that politicians practice in public. I have already said that this
kind of public religion often violates the spirit of the First Amendment. But it needs also
to be said that such religion often smells of self-idolatry. It is an expression of nationalist
pride, of group egoism. Its symbolic gestures make for bad religion as well as bad
politics.
Pretending to speak for the people as a whole on religious topics, the politicians
imply that citizens who refuse to be spoken for in this way are less than full-fledged
members of the people. When dissenters object, they are demonized as secularists.
Symbolic sacrifice of the secularist scapegoat is itself a ritual essential to the public
religion that some politicians and intellectuals would have the nation adopt. Those who
perform this ritual rend the body politic at the very moment that they purport to be
binding it together symbolically. Of course, they know exactly what they are doing.
A country that has preachers, prophets, poets, houses of worship, and open air
does not need politicians expressing its collective piety in public places. Individual
citizens, families, churches, and other religious bodies can be trusted to find appropriate
ways to express their own religious convictions and train the young in virtue. What the
people need from political leaders are the virtues of truthfulness, justice, practical
wisdom, courage, vision, and a kind of compassion whose effects can actually be
discerned in the lives of the poor and the elderly.
Politics is the art of tending to the arrangements we make for ourselves. Citizens
should feel free to say what they wish about those arrangements, not least of all by
expressing their religious convictions and drawing inferences from those convictions
about what our arrangements should be. Political officials, without pretending to hold no
such convictions themselves, should take pains, in their public pronouncements as well as
in the laws they propose and the policies they execute, to respect the religious plurality of
the people and do what they can to bind us together in love of justice and peace.
If our leaders fail to do this, it falls to the rest of us to hold them accountable. We
do this in the most basic way when we vote them out of office because they have
represented us poorly or improperly. The electoral process is the most basic legal means
of accountability the citizens of a representative democracy have at their disposal. But
the electoral process counts for nothing unless the spirit of democracy is made manifest
in the behavior of ordinary citizens outside the voting booth.
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It is up to us to demand reasons from our leaders, to subject those reasons to
criticism, and state reasons for whatever alternative conclusions we reach—and, in doing
these things, to build up the spirit of democracy among us. When we allow political
advertising and the demagoguery of talk radio and cable TV to replace public reasoning
in a democratic spirit, the result is government of the people by the corporations and for
the corporations. But whom do we have to blame but ourselves? Martin Luther King Jr.
was right to suggest that injustice needs our silence to maintain a grip on power. This
was his way of saying that things would be different if you and I and others like us
behaved differently.
Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?”
Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 269-270.
3
John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” in Pragmatism: A Reader, edited by Louis Menand (New
York: Vintage Books, 1997),
4
Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision, expanded edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004),
598.
5
Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 157.
6
David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 148.
7
Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism (New York: Penguin Press,
2004), chapter 3.
8
West, Democracy Matters, chapters 4 and 5.
9
West, Democracy Matters, chapter 6.
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